Sunday, January 6, 2013

Knowing? Or Knowing About?

As I open the mystery box of unidentified faces in unmarked
photos, I sift through them in the hopes of finding someone I recognize.

I do.

Incredibly, looking much the same as the subject of yesterday’s
post—“The End” of the Bean family line, Greg—there is a photo of a tall, thin
man with dark, curly hair.

He is not Greg, though, but Greg’s father. If it weren’t for
the generation that separated them, you would have thought they were twins.
Take a look back to yesterday’s post and see for yourself.

There are actually two pictures that I can identify for sure—and
a third that I wonder about (which I’ll share with you tomorrow). It’s eerie,
looking into that face. I feel like I know the man—and yet, I never met him. His
life, cut short, was over long before I could have made his acquaintance.

And yet, all my adult life, I’ve carried that feeling as if
I knew him. It was all because I knew his son.

How many times have we talked about “knowing” someone,
though, yet not really knowing them?
Sometimes, we make that delineation between “knowing” someone and “knowing about” someone.

As I go through the genealogical record of Earle Raymond Bean, though, it turns out that, not only did I never actually know him, I don’t
know much about him, either. Despite
all the stories that have been shared with me over the years, I find that I don’t
even have the date of his marriage, nor even the place of his birth. Because
those dates are relatively recent, online scans of documents to assist me in
this search are not available.

I do know that Earle Raymond Bean was born in 1926 in California, most likely in the county where his family
had moved—Alameda County, east of San
Francisco. He was born to Samuel and Maud Woodworth Bean.

It was Maud—or at least the Woodworth family—that Earle
could thank for the unusual spelling of his first name. What his fellow
childhood classmates and teachers didn’t realize was that, in his case, Earle
was not a misspelled first name, but a family surname carried by several
relatives in previous generations.

Earle, however, succumbed to modern convention and dropped
the “e,” adding one more check-point to my research, whenever I sense a lack of
progress.

Long after he was gone, though, his wife took care to tell
me the finer points of that story. She—the former Marilyn Beverly Sowle—was a
southern California
girl. Technically, though, she was a SoCal transplant, having been born in Wisconsin to David and Olive Brague Sowle, who had
decided to head to Los Angeles
early in their marriage.

Funny how I can know all this detail about their lives—down to
the last “e” in a name—and yet not know some pertinent details for the
genealogical record.

While I feel so much like I know this man and his wife—Earle Raymond Bean and his intended,
Marilyn Beverly Sowle—there is so much I don’t know about them.

While I can gaze at the detail of the snapshot of their
wedding reception and realize that the picture hanging above their cake is the
same one that has hung in my sister-in-law’s house to the end of her own life
last November, I can’t tell you when
that couple cut their wedding cake.

While I can tell you when
Earle Bean was born, I can’t even tell you where—though I can provide my
guesses as to which town in northern California
it might have been.

I can’t even tell you where the photo (top left) was taken—though
I can tell you it was in jest over Earle’s height (if I remember correctly, he
was six foot six inches tall) relative to Marilyn’s petite frame.

I can tell you Earle served in the United States Marine Corps,
as close as you could get in Iwo Jima without being in that famous picture on
that eventful day.

But I can’t really tell you much else about him. Except for one thing: when he died. I know it was December
11, 1955, because I’ve seen it on his headstone at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San
Bruno when I went to say goodbye to his wife. After
all those years apart, Marilyn could never find another to love, and once again
was at his side.

I also feel as if I "know" certain ancestors simply because I've heard stories, I've looked at pictures, and I've located records - SOME records. I'm often sent onto Mr. Toad's Wild Ride imagining those other details I couldn't possibly know such as how they laughed, how they walked, whether they were irritable before their morning coffee. I have to stop myself.

Funny thing about that picture...I've seen it for years, mostly at my sister-in-law's place, if I remember correctly, and then when her mom moved in with her, I somehow never realized it was Marilyn's rather than Judy's. In my mind, it was one of those typical '70s kinds of prints. I guess I just had it placed in the wrong time frame. It was weird seeing it for the first time in the context of that wedding photo!

About Me

It is my contention that, after a lifetime, one of the greatest needs people have is to be remembered. They want to know: have I made a difference?
I write because I can't keep for myself the gifts others have entrusted to me. Through what I've already been given--though not forgetting those to whom I must pass this along--from family I receive my heritage; through family I leave a legacy. With family I weave a tapestry. These are my strands.